Thursday, April 16, 2009

This photo reminded me of an old radio program I listened to that featured callers telling tales of run-ins with nasty insects. An entomologist was the studio guest. I remember one caller who woke to find a hissing cockroach "drinking" from the base of her eyelashes. The bug expert said the roach was testing the moisture for drinkability. Another caller told a story of her honeymoon. It was night and a giant spider was in their room above the only door out. Tarantula-sized. The couple decided to make a break for it and quickly ran into the hallway. They ran into a bunch of flying cockroaches circling the ceiling light out in the hall. The bug guy said the spider was feasting on the occasional roach that made it into the room. The best part was that the entomologist would laugh during the horror stories. He was clearly rooting for the bugs.

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I think what started me being freaky about roaches was that scene in Creepshow, where the guy has all those roaches pouring out of him... Sometime after that, I found a roach crawling across my ceiling (eeew!) and tried to be brave and deal with it. I found out then that they fly! AAAAAAGH!Mr. ShellHawk's job from then on was dealing with any of those little monsters. NOT MY JOB!

I recently had the "pleasure" of getting one-on-one with several large insects at the National Science Teachers Association conference in New Orleans. Go to my blog to see the pictures. You will have to scroll down a bit, just past the New Orleans pictures. It's here on blogspot, under "Thudmunson"

A coworker of mine said that when she was first dating her husband, they went on a scenic drive to the Pocono mountains. She tripped on a nature trail and fell down a small ravine and cut herself on an old barbed wire fence that was laying flat on the ground. She got up and was covered in tiny pale ticks. She said he refused to let her into the car at first. She recalled her mother going through her hair later that night removing ticks from her scalp with vaseline and tweesers.

I have no real life bug horror stories. Mine reside in my subconscious. I periodically wake up (or perhaps I'm not quite awake) and have hallucinations of bugs crawling all over the wall, ceiling, etc. Not sure why; I'm not afraid of bugs. I've had them off and on since my teen years. Sometimes I think they're far more horrifying than any real encounter!

I briefly lived in Houston in a dilapidated house with no A/C. One morning I woke to find a huge roach on my chest, apparently drinking from a pool of sweat in the slight depression over my sternum. These palmetto bugs would crawl down from the trees when it rained and when I'd come home from work and turn on the lights they would flee in every direction. Sometimes I had to eat food that I knew they had gotten into when I was waiting for my first check from that job. And they'd fly right at you seeming to sense your revulsion, sort of like alpha roaches staking out their territory. Sometimes you could repeatedly smack a roach with a rolled-up newspaper just to have it escape unharmed. They actually flattened themselves in anticipation of the blow, making only a direct hit effective.

We were living in Brooklyn at the time when my wife woke me up in the middle if the night. She said she heard the cats playing with something in the kitchen. As I got up I saw both cats lying in our bed but the scraping sound continued. I slowly walked toward the kitchen. The moon provided enough light to see this small black object moving across the floor. It was a roach pushing on an ant trap trying to get the bait.

It reminds me of a Benny Goodman joke:

The roaches are so big that one woke me up in the middle of the night saying, " Hey you know we got ants!"

haha I love all the responses to this post. The only one I can think of isjumping into a pool at my Uncles in Florida, As I came up out of the water it seems I had over looked the fact there was a tarantula in the are I jumped. For some reason he thought I was land and skittered towards my face and I tried splashing him but it only made it worse. I back paddled to move away and that worked but he kept coming at me and I finally worked enough current to get him away and into a corner where he sank. For some reason he decided to stay underwater and he was able to walk from one end of the large pool to the other. Thats my icky bug story. Im also an agoraphobic.

I was working in Indiana once on business for a few months. When the weather turned warm, yellow jacket hornets went crazy and would attack your face as soon as you would go outside. I remember seeing people running down the street, horrified. Apparently it happened every year at the same time the weather changed.

So one day, i'm driving and a coworker with me starts screaming because a yellow jacket got into the car and was buzzing all over the place. Being a man, I screamed and pulled the car over and we both jumped out of the car and closed the doors. So this bee is in the car and the humans are outside the car looking in. I ran about 50 yards away and made her open the door and let the bee out.

I just remembered a bug story. My friend was driving and I was sitting in the passenger seat. We had the windows down cuz' it was gorgeous outside and we both heard this buzzing noise coming from my purse. I didn't have my phone on vibrate so I lifted my purse up to look and there was a bee sitting on it. Freaked me out and we both started screaming. She started driving faster while I held my purse out the window. Eventually her speed made him fall off of my purse. Eventually we had to pull over because my friend was laughing so hard she couldn't see the road through her tears. Good times.